Reader response and the preschool child

Small children in early childhood classrooms thoroughly enjoy books as they individually explore and listen to them read aloud. Enjoyment should be the foremost reason for preschool children experiencing books; however, teachers can influence emerging literacy skills with the use of read-aloud events. Teachers can also offer a variety of reader response materials for the children to create personal responses to literature. Reader response, the unique and personal expression to a piece of literature, reflecting the age and experiential background of the individual, is the focus of this study of the preschool child. In context of this study, it will be the preference of the children to exhibit their feelings, thoughts, and creative preferences during interactions and transactions with the book and each other. Preschool children's patterns of response to literature read aloud are documented in this case study centering on five-year-olds who display their response exhibiting three distinct modes: Imitation, Imagination, and Interaction. Documented are spontaneous patterns of response to children's literature as they listened and interacted to read-aloud events. Sustained opportunities with a variety of response-based materials detected further response choices as the children created artistic and dramatic play responses to literature. The theoretical framework of this study based itself in Rosenblatt's (1938) reader response theory, read-aloud events and response, play, and whole language beliefs. Hickman (1979) provides a response typology that reinforces as well as departs from the evidence in this single case study limited to preschool children bounded by time. Consistent with case study design, the researcher identified multiple sources of information including teachers, staff, and parents. Anecdotal records, videotape, and collection of artifacts were the primary means of data collection throughout the eight-week study. Findings suggest preschool children use and expand their emerging literacy skills through response to children's literature. Detected through the children's responses to books and interactions with response-based materials were three modes unique to preschool children within eighteen observable response behaviors. These findings offer educators, parents, librarians, and caregivers explicit means to initiate child-centered literature-based learning strategies that support, enhance, and foster preschool children's emergent literacy skills.